THE SALK

For 300 teenage women, Nobel Prize winner Elizabeth Blackburn shared words of encouragement and issued an appeal to duty Thursday. Science is a fascinating career, opportunities in it for women are increasing and the world depends on the contributions of female scientists, she said. And Blackburn, president of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, pointed to...READ MORE

Busloads of students arrived at the Salk institute in La Jolla Thursday to attend the STEAM Leadership Series. 300 female high school students from 6 different schools in San Diego filled in The Conrad Prebys auditorium to learn all about STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math) careers. The STEAM Leadership Series focuses on career opportunities within STEAM fields and connects business leaders to San Diego students. Megan Moreau is an 11th grader at...READ MORE

“Stay Curious! Science Needs You!” These were the encouraging words Nobel Prize winner and Salk Institute for Biological Studies CEO Elizabeth Blackburn shared with 300 teenage girls as her presentation came to a close at a recent event held at Salk’s auditorium in La Jolla. The all-female audience consisted of students from six different high schools in the San Diego Unified School District, all of whom gathered to attend...READ MORE

ILLUMINA/ALHAMBRA

The successful San Diego STEAM Leadership Series

The successful San Diego STEAM Leadership Series bridges high-tech and science businesses with the high school system in San Diego in order to empower students from Title 1 schools and others to live their dreams and find great careers. We are entering our third successful year. Previous events include the annual “Women at Salk” with Nobel laureate Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn (400 all young women,) “Drones on the Midway” with Northrup Grumman, General Atomics-Aeronautics, and Chris Anderson of 3D Robotics, Skies to the Streets,” also covering the Midway Museum; “Personalized Medicine” with Drs. Eric Topol and Stephen Kingsmore at the Illumina Theater/Alhambra, and many more.

Intellectual capital - GAME CHANGING PEOPLE AND IDEAS

​NEW COMMERCIAL VIDEO PRODUCTION “INTELLECTUAL IMPACT”— THE NEXT GENERATION OF CORPORATE MEDIA​NEW UBER-BLOG: "Intellectual Capital About Town," an opinionated multi-media run-through of goings on in San Diego and beyond. Life is curious! (SEE MORE/BLOG on top tabs)

NEW ﻿"﻿INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL ABOUT TOWN" VIDEOS﻿:﻿ (SEE BELOW)

NEW: STEAM LEADERSHIP LECTURE SERIES (SEE BELOW)

New Work for the City of Carlsbad: IONIS PHARMACEUTICALS

​INNOVATION NIGHT AT THE LA JOLLA PLAYHOUSE

CBS COVERAGE OF THE SAN DIEGO UNIFIED STEAM LEADERSHIP EVENT, MAY 20, 2016, ON THE USS MIDWAY MUSEUM, “From the Skies to the Streets"

​BLUE OCEANS - 5th in Our STEAM Series, a Project of Intellectual Capital and Kids Eco Club in partnership with San Diego Unified School System and Education Synergy Alliance, with Sponsors the San Diego Foundation, SDG&E, USS Midway Museum, Farrell Family Foundation, the Duane Roth Legacy Fund, and Ford Motor. Special thanks to Rubio’s Restaurants and producing vendor UCTV.

​2ND IN THE SERIES: "DRONES ON THE MIDWAY" with 850 high schoolers on the Flight Deck of the USS MIDWAY MUSEUM with Supt. Cindy Marten, Northrop Grumman Sr. VP George Guerre, developer of the Global Hawk, Mike Atwood & Darren Moe from General Atomics, Mike Veale "The Drone Ranger," and Chris Anderson, co-founder of the cool 3DRobotics -- PICTURED

INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL PARTNERS WITH THE SAN DIEGO UNIFIED SCHOOL SYSTEM, AND KIDS ECO CLUB along with EDUCATION SYNERGY ALLIANCE, AND SPONSORS ResMed, Kyocera, the San Diego Foundation, SDG&E, and the USS Midway Museum WITH PRODUCING PARTNER UCTV

For the past several years, the entrepreneurial lectures at La Jolla Country Day School showcased wonderful game-changing men and women who have changed our world, or made it better.

They’ve founded companies that popularized the personal computer like Ted Waitt of Gateway (remember the famous black-and-white cow packaging?); or the original biotech such as Hybritech, founded by Dr. Ivor Royston; or Irwin Jacobs, co-founder of Qualcomm, which makes up the guts, that is what’s under the hood so to speak, of the world’s 7 billion (and counting!) cell phones; or Jeanne Loring, head of stem cells at The Scripps Research Institute; her counterpart at Sanford Burnham, Larry Goldstein; real estate impresario Ernest Rady, philanthropist Darlene Shiley—and more.

These offer lessons in HOW TO DO IT, what they did right that now rocks our world. These are special people, imparting unusual wisdom. I think you will enjoy. Read on—and click on the video— Browse the series

FEATURED PRINT COLUMNS FROM INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL

Carolina Vivas and Amanda McCarroll, two 35-year-old San Diego fitness instructors, have launched the Netflix of yoga. It’s called yourBuddhi, a name with ready-made branding because buddhi also means intellect or knowledge in Sanskrit. Yoga is an ancient practice, and Vivas and McCarroll aim to take it mobile. You can play their clever videos on....

Darwin the poodle bursts into Craig Venter’s capacious new office on Torrey Pines Road just as he is explaining the meaning of life.It’s digital, life. We are information systems.

The chemical elements of our DNA “software” can be broken down into the four nucleotides or bases that make up DNA, “the A’s, C’s, G’s and T’s ﻿of the biological world,” and converted into the 1s and 0s of the computer world, says Venter, 67.Read More

MOST RECENT COLUMNS

After only five years as an internist at Scripps Clinic, Dr. David Clayton could tell what was wrong with many of his patients before they even took off their shirts.

They were men, 50 to 80 years old, overweight, with high blood pressure and bad cholesterol — the perfect trifecta for the chronic metabolic disease currently bloating America. If they did nothing, they might be dead before their time, candidates for diabetes and stroke.

Some 90 percent of people over 60 take at least one medication, and more than one-third of those over 60 are on five or more medications.

And even many men and women who do get exercise and try to eat healthy fail because in this hyper-hyped world of “natural this and natural that,” they don’t understand the biochemical truth underlying their choices.Read More

Kim Kamdar of Domain Associates says the company is excited about biotech and medical device companies in the effort to tailor medicine to specific patients.

NELVIN C. CEPEDA • U-TDomain — which helped start Amgen, Applied Biosystems and Amylin, among others — is 21 percent invested in San Diego and is betting big on diagnostics companies. U-T San Diego recently talked with Kamdar, based in the San Diego office, about Domain’s investment strategy.Read More

Tech transfer is about dancing robots and curing brain cancer.Google and Gatorade, sleep apnea and gene-splicing.It’s how inventions and ideas — intellectual property — move out of university labs and get translated into commercial products and startup companies. Some $2.5 billion in licensing fees flowed to U.S. universities in 2010, with nearly 600 new companies formed.

Skip Coomber, 53, a Rancho Santa Fe attorney to “ultra-high-networth” clients, and a serial entrepreneur of tech and retail companies, did what can be done for fun and ultimate status, at least in California. He started a winery: Coomber Family Ranch Wines.

The Coombers — Skip, wife Maureen, 45, and daughters Amelia, 18, and Caroline, 16 — changed the traditional vintner game by bringing a high-tech approach to manufacturing, then adding a sweet giveback model to the marketing.Read More

Andrew Viterbi, co-founder and former longtime chief technology officer of Qualcomm, the giant San Diego company that creates the guts of the world’s cellphones, devised the Viterbi Algorithm, a mathematical formula for separating signal from noise. The Viterbi Algorithm has made cellphone communication possible, as well as the tracking of missiles, and even high-speed DNA analysis.

“A common sense solution to America’s health problems?” asks Dr. David Agus, author of the best-selling “A Short Guide to a Long Life” and co-founder of Applied Proteomics, a big-data La Jolla diagnostics company. “How about making elevators coin-operated?”Agus, head of the University of Southern California’s Westside Cancer Center, an expert in molecular medicine and a CBS News contributor, has become an apostle of prevention.He once stood up in an auditorium of oncologists and declared that metastatic cancer was better approached with preventive measures — before cancer was diagnosed — since cure rates after-the-fact are only marginally better than they were 50 years ago.

Greg Lucier has made the 21st century — the biological century — into a wise business proposition.In a deal completed Monday, Chief Executive Lucier and his team merged Carlsbad’s Life Technologies with Thermo Fisher, based in Waltham, Mass. Thermo paid $13.6 billion for Life, closer to $16 billion if you count assumed debt, in a deal that highly valued the company’s Ion Torrent genetic sequencing platform as well as Life’s bread-and-butter consumable lab products. The terms also provided Lucier with a $38 million personal exit.How did he do it — drive up the business of Life from $778 million a year in revenue in 2003 to $3.8 billion in 2012 — and what does he plan to do next?Read More

Larry King has been the king of the talk business — radio, television, and now the Internet — for longer than most Americans have been alive, 56 years.He has a new deal with Carlos Slim, richest man in the world, to produce and distribute “Larry King Now” on Hulu and Ora.tv. His 80th birthday was Tuesday. And, oh, yeah, baby, he’s married to his seventh wife.

“Innovation Night” at the La Jolla Playhouse was both a sad and a raucous affair this year.Sad, because it was dedicated to Duane Roth, the late director of Connect, an organization that brings inventors and investors together. Roth, who died after a bicycle accident in July, had coined the term Innovation Night as a way to link San Diego’s innovative wireless, biotech and high-tech industries to the innovative theater productions the Playhouse is known for.But raucous, too, because the gala opening play was “Side Show,” which is about two female circus performers, conjoined twins, not unlike innovative technologies and the future of San Diego, someone laughed at intermission.

Fernando Aguerre, 55, the co-founder with his brother Santiago of the iconic surf brand Reef, has reached the statesman stage of life.The Surf Industry Manufacturers Association named him Waterman of the Year, one of only two times in 24 years that a business guy, as opposed to surf legends Greg Noll, Kelly Slater and Rob Machado, has been picked.

The company is expanding to 100 employees spread among current engineering headquarters on Convoy Court in San Diego, manufacturing facilities in Tijuana, and sales and marketing in Berkeley, with capacity expected to double.Read More

Test preparation for college entrance exams, especially for the crucial Scholastic Aptitude Test, has become a $2 billion to $4 billion industry, along with the market for downloads and book supplements.There has been much debate about whether test prep can increase scores and by how much — a cost-ineffective 30 points or a healthy 100, enough to raise an admissions officer’s eyebrows and cause hand-clapping among parents who pay for all this.

With her mother, Joan, she is the creator of the Baggu, the colorful, “carry in style” reusable bag sold in hip stores from Urban Outfitters to Collette in Paris, as well as Nordstrom and J.Crew. Hundreds of thousands more, at a basic price of $9, are sold through the bright and spare Baggu website, which looks like a Google home page for the fashion-conscious.

“My mom and I just don’t like to buy ugly stuff. We care about function and fashion, and we feel we are representative of a demographic that appreciates this.”

Jack White pretty much developed the concept of the discount brokerage, the way stocks have come to be traded on the Internet for a small fee. This was in the 1970s and ’80s, years before E-Trade, Ameritrade or Charles Schwab.

He sold his company to the Toronto Dominion Bank for $110 million in 1998, back when $110 million bought more than a good breakfast at Brick and Bell, and the company formed the basis for TD Waterhouse, which became TD Ameritrade.Read More

"George Phydias Mitchell, “The Father of Fracking,” a technique for extracting natural gas and oil that is making the United States energy-independent, died last month at the age of 94. The Texas oilman transformed global energy markets by figuring out how to drill into and along layers of gas-laden shale rock, then force a slurry of water, sand and chemicals under high pressure into the rock to crack it open and release the hydrocarbons. Engineers later learned how to adapt this process, known as fracking, to oil-bearing rock. His son, research scientist B. Greg Mitchell, head of the Photobiology Group at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, sat down with Intellectual Capital to reminisce about how his father did it."Read More

“We like to say a watch is halfway between a T-shirt and a tattoo,” says Andy Laats, co-founder of Nixon, the surf/skate/snowboard accessories company in Encinitas. “If we can build something that you have never seen before, but you have always wanted, then we have done our job.”

Last year, biochemist Tina Nova sold Genoptix, the Carlsbad genomics testing company she co-founded in 1999, for $475 million to Novartis, making Nova a legend in the rarefied world of women at the top of U.S. science and business...

How do you start a thriving biotech company? The most painful way might be as follows: You’re Jay Lichter, managing partner of Avalon Ventures, and you’re driving your car near the post office in La Jolla, and all of a sudden you have a horrible attack of vertigo. You pull the car to the curb, convince yourself you’re dying of a heart attack, notice you are still alive after 15 minutes, no pain in the chest, but you still can’t sit up, can’t get out of the car...

Carolina Vivas and Amanda McCarroll, two 35-year-old San Diego fitness instructors, have launched the Netflix of yoga. It’s called yourBuddhi, a name with ready-made branding because buddhi also means intellect or knowledge in Sanskrit. Yoga is an ancient practice, and Vivas and McCarroll aim to take it mobile. You can play their clever videos on....

It’s springtime. You’re starting to see them everywhere: the girl on the Electra pink Hawaii, the dude wheeling down the Crystal Pier on his Tiger Shark beach cruiser, the aging hipster-prof pulling up to the Pannikin coffeehouse on his retro-modern Italian Ticino...